momagri, movement for a world agricultural organization, is a think tank chaired by Christian Pèes.It brings together, managers from the agricultural world and important people from external perspectives, such as health, development, strategy and defense. Its objective is to promote regulationof agricultural markets by creating new evaluation tools, such as economic models and indicators,and by drawing up proposals for an agricultural and international food policy.

Mediterranean Basin countries:
A new partnership for food security

December 9, 2013

The first conference of the Agriculture Ministers of Mediterranean countries was held in Algiers on November 27, 2013, and organized as part of the 5+5 dialog. The ten nations, including five from the Arab Maghreb Union––Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania and Morocco––and five countries from the southern E.U.––Spain, France, Malta, Portugal and Italy––agreed to initiate a strategy to fight food insecurity, design an appropriate system to manage food crises, and encourage growth and employment in rural areas.

The participating countries committed to “form a partnership” with the two objectives exposed by French Minister of Agriculture Stéphane Le Foll. The first objective involves “an observatory for consumers and food security” for the region. The second is the implementation in February 2014 of a “technical system of trade statistics on agricultural production and reserve levels”, based on the model of the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) already in place for the G20. As indicated by Stéphane Le Foll, such tools are “extremely important for coordinating agricultural policies” to “prevent the effects of price volatility and the speculative consequences that may occur when we least expect them.”

It is a bold initiative since the challenges to fight food insecurity in the Mediterranean area are indeed sizeable. While agriculture is one of the key pillars of these economies, and provides a livelihood for 25 percent of the zone’s total population, it is still uncertain for several reasons:

- Structural factors: Limited resources in farmland and chronic droughts, demographic pressure, scarcity of local supply against exploding demand and ageing infrastructures;
- Political and economic destabilizing factors expressed by, among others, the Arab waves of unrest;
- Endogenous factors and market risks: The financialization of agricultural commodity markets and the hyper-volatility of food prices, which is one of the factors triggering the recent food crises occurring in the region;
- The “grain overdependence”: Securing food supplies is all the more tenuous since these countries are increasingly relying on foreign markets. Thus, Tunisia currently imports 80 percent of its soft wheat requirements and 20 percent of its durum wheat needs. This situation can generate additional sharp reversals in agricultural prices.

“The Algiers declaration” could thus serve as the foundation for a new regional agricultural strategy able to assist Mediterranean countries in meeting their agricultural challenges.